For a bit more than a year, we’ve been trying to find different ways to tell the stories of mental health and mental illness in America.

The shootings at Sandy Hook presented a national narrative that was conducted at two poles. On one end, we made the conversation about guns. On the other, it was about mental illness.

It seems we conducted these different conversations the same way: too simply, with too little nuance, and too little listening to others. Many seemed content in their belief that we really knew all that we could know about that incident, and about that shooter; that just keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, and strengthening our mental health system, would solve our problems.